This Crooked Way Part 16

"I heard you move and say something."

I'd heard the same thing, but it wasn't me. I held up the golem ear. Startled, he put his ear against the thing and then gestured that I should do the same from the other side.

We heard Morlock's voice as he moved around in the shop downstairs: -'blood of Ambrose'-unlikely. This really might be phlogopos juice, though. Yes. That'll do." After a few moments the severed ear emitted a crackling sound.

I realized that he had somehow enchanted the golem ears. We were hearing what the ear nailed to the shop door was hearing. This was what I thought, but what I said was, "He talks to himself when he's alone!"

Thend shrugged. "Sure. He's almost completely crazy: hadn't you noticed?"

I told Thend something I'd noticed about him, and he was hotly denying it when Morlock appeared through the hatch.

The crooked man pinned my brother with a single gray glance and Thend snapped his mouth shut.

"Can you jump across to that roof?" Morlock asked Thend, pointing at the nearest building.

Thend nodded.

"Do it, then. If you think anyone on the street saw you leap, keep on going and don't wait for us. We'll meet you back with Roble and Naeli. Got It?"

Thend nodded again.

"Then," said Morlock.

Thend ran, crouching, across the roof of Charis's shop, and leapt to the nearest roof. He waited there, crouching. No one called out; no one seemed to have seen him. He gestured that we should follow.

"Go," said Morlock.

"Why are you so sure I can?" I asked.

He looked at me, surprised. "You can run faster and jump farther than any of your brothers-except Stador, perhaps. If Thend can do it, you can do it. Go."

I was mad. "I'm not one of your stupid golems!" I hissed.

He looked at me more carefully. "Fasra, I'm sorry to seem abrupt. I set fire to Charis's shop after I sent you up here, and soon the gangsters will notice and risk breaking in. We should be well away by then. So: go. Now."

"Take your nasty ear!" I whispered furiously, shoving it at him. I ran across the roof and jumped to the next one. Morlock followed, holding the golem ear to one of his own, looking solemn and ridiculous.

We had crossed a few more roofs when Morlock abruptly dropped the golem ear, crushing it under his shoe. "They're breaking into Charis's shop," he said. "We'll try going down to street level here: they'll soon realize we escaped across the roofs."

He pulled up the roof hatch of the building we were on. He did it so casually, I thought the thing was unbolted ... but then I saw the latch dangling from the undrawn bolt. He dropped down into the hatch and reached up to help us down.

As my eyes were still adjusting to the dimness within a big bulky guy approached us and shouted at Morlock, "Hey! Customers not allowed on roof! Get out of here! You two"-he gestured at Thend and me-"get back to rooms."

I saw now that the walls were covered in red velvet, and there were some pungent odors a.s.saulting my nose-some sweet, some less so. I'd worked as a housekeeper-and that's all, by the way-at the village cathouse, so it was all pretty familiar.

"Uncle Morlock," I said, in a high-pitched little-girl falsetto, "what sort of place is this?"

The big bulky guy looked at me, puzzled, and then back to Morlock.

"I beg your pardon for the intrusion, and the damage to your roof door," Morlock said, presenting the big guy with a gold coin.

"Damage?" The big guy looked at the broken latch and said, "Oh, yeah."

He didn't seem too mad, though, and he was even less so when Morlock presented him with a second gold coin.

A third coin made the guy positively beam with welcome. "No problem!" he said. "Drop in any time! Stay as long as you like! What was name again?"

"Morlock Ambrosius. But we'll have to leave immediately," Morlock said. "We were escaping from a fire up the street and-"

"Fire?" said the big guy, not so friendly anymore. He shouldered past us and hauled himself halfway through the roof hatch. He must have seen the plume of smoke over Charis's shop right away because he dropped down and ran up the corridor shouting, "Fire! Fire! Fire up street! Everyone out! Fire up street!"

The corridor was suddenly full of screaming people in varying states of undress. Morlock drew me and my brother back against one wall and we waited for the riptide of frightened people to pa.s.s away.

"Why didn't you mention the fire before you gave him the money?" I asked Morlock, thinking that he could have saved himself three gold coins.

Morlock looked at me almost pityingly and said, "Then he wouldn't have waited to take the money."

Morlock's back was to Thend, who mouthed the word crazy to me. To emphasize the point he crossed his eyes, drew his upper lip above his teeth, and, after putting his wrists to either side of his forehead, waggled his hands gently. It was pretty funny, but I didn't react until Morlock glanced over at Thend and Thend's face froze in panic. Then I laughed.

The hallway was mostly clear by then, and we followed the tail end of the crowd down a rickety flight of stairs and into the street. It was full of people now, some panicking, some laughing, some screaming ... and some who were cool and intent, their faces and their hands bristling with metal.

"Sandboys!" I hissed at Morlock.

He followed my gaze and said, "Both of you go. Get back to Naeli and Roble. I'll meet you."

Then he drew his dagger and long pointed sword. Somehow he was standing differently, too-sort of sideways, with his feet at right angles to each other. Then his sword flickered out and one of the Sandboys fell to the ground spewing blood. Morlock moved again-it was almost like dancing; I could not believe that crooked ugly man could move so gracefully-and another Sandboy was down, leaking blood onto the cobblestones. His sword and his dagger were dripping red now; several Sandboys were down, but more were approaching through the crowd.

"Come on!" Thend shouted in my ear.

I turned away and ran weeping through the hysterical crowd, heedless of whether Thend was following or not. It had all been sort of funny up to that point-even the worst parts with the golem-Charis and Stokkvenn. But it wasn't funny now. Those weren't golem bodies. .h.i.tting the ground. Real men were trying to kill Morlock, and he would kill as many as he needed to escape. I wondered who would succeed and I wondered why I cared.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me. I'm not sure why I'm telling you about this at all: maybe because most of these people are lost to me now, and telling you about them almost brings them back. In any case, since I'm telling you about it, I want you to get the right idea.

I wasn't squeamish. I couldn't afford to be. From the time I was seven until just a few months ago I'd been living in a village where human sacrifice was a daily occurrence. Every night the adults of the village would go out into the woods and onto the Road and capture people to feed to the G.o.d in the Ground. I'd been taken that way myself, lost in the woods as a child. I'd only been saved because my mother went and pledged her service to the G.o.d in the Ground. In local slang, we became Bargainers, and we stayed in the Bargainer village until I was thirteen. Then Roble and Morlock killed the G.o.d in the Ground and freed my mother and we had to flee. I'd seen plenty of death, too much for a girl my age, too much for a person of any age, and it wasn't the deaths in the marketplace that disturbed me, exactly.

Part of it was the blood. The G.o.d in the Ground preferred to consume his victims alive in his pit under the Hungry Tree, so it was rare that any Bargainer had occasion to shed blood or see it. The sight of the blood sickened me and excited me in a way I can't explain.

Part of it was the thought that Morlock might die. My mother had condemned herself to years of horror for my sake. I loved her for it, and I was grateful, but there was no way I could ever pay her back. If Morlock died covering our escape, there would be another unpayable debt on my conscience, and I wanted no more of them.

All of which I offer as part-explanation for the fact that, as I ran, I sobbed, "Why won't they leave me alone?"

"I think they're after Morlock, not us," Thend gasped helpfully as he jogged beside me.

I told him to shut his piehole and ran weeping back to mother.

Our mother, Naeli, was sitting on the front steps of an abandoned house. When she saw us approaching without Morlock she stood and called out, "Roble."

Our uncle Roble and our two older brothers, Stador and Bann, came out of the house. All of the houses on this street were abandoned; nearly half the buildings within the city walls were empty. The city had once been much wealthier, much more populous. That was before the Khroi came, conquering the mountains and closing the pa.s.s to the north: the Kirach Kund, the River of Skulls-the place that was death to enter. (And which, for some reason, use were going to enter.) Since the north-south trade had been cut off there'd been less money to go around, less reason for anyone to live in Sarkunden, and the city was rotting away from inside. Maybe that was why everyone in Sarkunden was a money-hungry b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Or maybe they would have been money-hungry b.a.s.t.a.r.ds wherever they happened to live.

Roble and Naeli waited until we were within speaking distance and then Naeli said, "Are you all right?"

"We're fine," Thend said.

"What about Morlock?" Roble said.

"Well, there were Sandboys-" I said.

"What's a Sandboy?" Roble and Naeli said, almost together.

I don't know how many people there are in your family. In mine it seemed like there were always twice as many people as there actually were, and every one of them was trying to interrupt me whenever I said something. I let Thend do most of the talking, only chiming in when he screwed something up, the way he does sometimes, or when someone was picking on him, the way Stador and Bann always were.

Thend's pretty determined, and he set out to tell the story from the beginning. There were a lot of interruptions, questions, and explanations and it took a long time, but he finally did it.

Naeli looked at Roble. "What do you think? Should we go and see what we can do?"

Roble scowled and shrugged. He looked at Thend: "What do you think?"

Thend opened his hands and said, "The fight's over by now. He's away or they caught him. Maybe they killed him, but Morlock thought they wanted him alive."

"They might have lost their tempers, though," Roble observed dryly. "He can be irritating."

"Tell me about it," Thend snorted.

Then the topic was whether we ought to go to the Sandboys and bribe them to release Morlock. I didn't know what we were going to bribe them with, as we'd left our homes with little more than the clothes on our backs, but n.o.body asked for my opinion anyway. I guess that's the price of not saying much: people a.s.sume you don't have much to say.

I finally did say something, though. "Hey!" I shouted, and pointed at the open doorway of the house. Morlock was standing there in the shadows of the entry hall.

Naeli and Roble wanted him to come out and tell his part of the story, but he gestured at them without speaking and backed into the house. Then we all realized that it was one thing for us to be standing talking in the street; it was another thing for him: an imperial outlaw who had a water-gang out after him. And we realized all this without him having to say a word, which was how he liked it. He didn't like to say two words if one or none would do.

We trooped inside. In the dusty entryway within, empty except for our gear, Roble said, "Well? What happened with the Sandboys?"

"Lost them," Morlock said. I saw Roble's face fall when he realized that was all we were going to hear about Morlock's big fight in the marketplace. Thinking back on those b.l.o.o.d.y bodies falling to the ground, I was just as pleased, but men look at these things differently, I've noticed. "Came in through the back door and heard you out there," Morlock added, in a burst of eloquence.

He sat down beside his big heavy backpack, a little abruptly.

"Are you wounded?" Naeli said sharply, going and kneeling beside him.

"Old wound in my leg," he explained. "It aches a little when I fight-or run."

My mother began to ma.s.sage his leg.

Stador and Bann looked a little blank. Roble got this grin on his dark face. Like, Bless you, my children. Thend looked mad-he didn't like any of the signs that our mother and Morlock were getting close. Jealousy, I guess: he'd lost her for six years or more, had just gotten her back, and was in no mood to share her with a stranger whose skin made one think of mushrooms and dead fish. Personally, I was happy for her. She was younger then than I am now, a vigorous and beautiful woman in the last summery glory of her youth. But back then I thought of her as quite old, almost as old as Morlock, and I didn't see why two old people shouldn't be happy together. I wasn't surprised that she took to him either: the only other men she'd seen for the last six years had been either sacrifices to the G.o.d in the Ground, or the men of the Bargainer village, all of them pretty repulsive types. I actually don't think she'd been with anyone since my father died, and that was well before I was born, maybe fourteen years since.

The only two people who didn't seem to have any emotional reaction to what was going on were Morlock and Naeli themselves. Naeli was saying, in a matter-of-fact voice, "What are we going to do now?"

Morlock said flatly, "I think you should go to Ontil, the imperial capital. I still have some friends there and they can help you find a place to stand. I'll give you a letter."

"While you go north alone," Naeli said icily. "Into the Kirach Kund, without the information Charis was going to get for you."

That was what Morlock had been expecting from Charis: information from the imperial scouts on what the Khroic hordes in the mountains were up to. It might make the difference in surviving the trip through the deadly pa.s.s. He said he'd already paid for it and all he needed to do was pick it up. (He'd told us the whole story, but I've forgotten half of it, and I'm not sure I believe the half that I remember.) That was what had led to the fiasco in the Market today.

Morlock wasn't saying anything, as usual, but it was the way he wasn't saying it.

"Come on, Morlock," said Roble, a little impatiently. "If you're going to dump us here the least you owe us is an explanation."

I didn't see this at all. But apparently it convinced Morlock because he said, "All right. I'm going to try to find Charis. He's probably still alive-he's good at that sort of thing, and his enemies don't seem to have found him yet."

"And he may have your information."

"Um. Yes."

"Morlock! Spit it out!" Roble said it, but it might have been any of us.

The crooked man shrugged. "It's a question of who's really after him. The guard? He's been a goose laying golden eggs for them for years now. The Sandboys? I expect the same is true: he seemed to be greasing every palm in town when I was last here. No one has any motive to kill him."

"So there's someone else," Roble said. "Is it important who?"

"It might be," Morlock said.

"Why?"

"Charis would have attracted the hostile attention of this person shortly after he was fishing for information about the Kirach Kund-and the Khroi. It may be a mere coincidence, or the Khroi may have a powerful agent in this city. I want to know if this is true."

"Then we'll stay and help you find out," Roble said. "Afterward we can take up the question of who's going where."

"The h.e.l.l we will!" Naeli said fiercely. "Morlock, you are not going to abandon us in this d.a.m.nable place where everything and everybody is for sale."

"Ontil isn't like Sarkunden," Morlock said. "Nor do you know what the Kirach Kund is like."

"I know this much-"

"Let's table it," Roble said briskly. "I say we eat and sleep and start looking for Charis tonight when the Sandboys are in their little sandbeds."

Roble was pretty good at breaking up arguments. Maybe it was all those years of living with my mom. Anyway, that was what we did, but it didn't work exactly as he'd planned it.

We always kept watch at night, and we didn't see any reason to change that because we were camping in a house instead of an open field. (We didn't want to wake up and find the house surrounded by Keeps or Sandboys.) With seven of us no one had to stay up long, although it was a pain to stand watch in the middle of the night, so we rotated. That night, Morlock took the first watch and I took the second. Thend was third, and boy was he grumpy when I woke him. We argued about what time it was, and afterward I was too mad to sleep, so I wandered around the house to find someone awake to talk to. That was how I noticed that Morlock's room, on the second floor of the abandoned house, was empty, the unfastened shutters flapping gently in the night breeze.

It sort of looked like he'd climbed out the window, so I poked my head out and looked around. It took a while to spot him, but I finally saw a crooked silhouette right up at the end of the alley: Morlock.

I climbed out the window and followed him.

If you'd asked me why at the time, I couldn't have explained it. It certainly wasn't any echo of my mother's romantic feelings: I thought Morlock was repulsive. But I liked him and was mad at him in a way I didn't try to understand.

Now that I've seen my daughters with their father, I understand a little better. I never knew my father, and I was always latching on to older men in the Bargainer village-some of them pretty creepy. (It was only thanks to Naeli's vigilance that I was still a virgin at thirteen.) Morlock was another one of these stand-ins for my father, I think. In lots of ways he was a pretty bad fit, but in some he was a good one. My mother and he seemed to have something going on, or something about to begin, for one thing. For another, he had a wholly disinterested kindness for me and for Thend. In any case, I always felt safe with him-I knew he'd always stand between me and danger. The only other person I ever felt that way about was Naeli, and I knew there were some things she couldn't handle. I wasn't sure if that was true about Morlock. (Turns out there was plenty, but I didn't know that then.) Anyway: I followed him. At first I tried to catch up, and then I realized that might not be too smart-if he noticed me while we were still close to the house, he might take me back and wake Naeli and Roble, and there would be screaming and shouting offensive to my sensitive spirit. So I started to sneak along, just near enough to keep him in sight.

After a while I realized something: I wasn't the only person following him. There was a furtive shadow slinking along among other shadows lining the street between Morlock and me. A Sandboy, I figured: maybe one of them had trailed Morlock to the house, in spite of what he'd thought, and was now following him to find out where Charis was (if Morlock was right about that).

I crept closer to the shadowy figure, very gradually and carefully so as to not give myself away. I wanted a closer look at him and, when I got one, I suddenly realized that I recognized the guy, even though (strictly speaking) I'd never seen him before. He was very dirty and bedraggled, but his greasy hair was a pale yellow and his sickly skin was white as a wax candle in dim ambient moonlight. His eyes, I bet, would be green. Charis-the original master wonder-worker of that nasty little establishment Morlock had burned down this afternoon.